Trenchant observations on the enduring Cuban mystique.
A Cuban essayist, critic, and art curator reflects on various aspects of the Cuban socialist revolution, subsequent capitalist experiments, and ongoing tensions with the U.S.
In these brief, pointed essays published in Spanish-language periodicals since the 1990s, de la Nuez, who left Cuba in 1991 and lives in Barcelona, shows how Cuba managed to weather its socialist revolution, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, and has not embraced democracy since the death of its seminal founder, Fidel Castro, and retirement of his brother, Raul, in 2021. Instead, the author argues that Cuba has embraced “an ecstasy of exceptionality” and has chosen “to go it alone.” He looks at some of the aspects of this exceptionalism through the last three decades, mostly in the world of arts and culture. These include the parade of intellectuals through Cuba since the 1960s, “ever ready to give theoretical support to the so-called Cuban way”; the cunning “iconocracy” employed by Fidel in pictures and movies to spread the Cuban mystique (“Castro never needed a spin doctor”); and a “post-communist” New Left that has forgotten the countless problems under the previous dictator, Fulgencio Batista, accepted the ideology of the free market, and “found refuge in less rugged landscapes.” Indeed, notes de la Nuez, Batista “has made a comeback as the great Cuban hashtag.” The author also discusses the Cuban “rhapsody” portrayed in works by Che Guevara, Wim Wenders, Steven Spielberg, and Oliver Stone, among others, and the nostalgia regarding music and cars. He writes movingly of the Cuban diaspora, of which he is a part, and he introduces us to elements of the new Cuban economy, which he calls the “catharsis of controlled hedonism.” When a Cuban press finally published Nineteen Eighty-Four, in January 2016, “there was no shortage of people pointing out how belated the publication of this masterpiece was.”
Trenchant observations on the enduring Cuban mystique.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781644213247
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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